: Re: Making simple sentences more interesting The street is filled with cars and people. I tend to write simple, straightforward sentences, like the one above. Can you suggest ways I can write
Simplicity is a virtue. Don't assume that "simple" and "straightforward" are necessarily less interesting than "complex" and "indirect." Any sentence you write should be judged "better" or "worse" on one basis only: how well it accomplishes your purpose in constructing it.
You might want a sentence to be flowery, caustic, dynamic, subtle, poetic, informative, grim, exciting, or any number of other things. The effect you want to accomplish with any given sentence is limited only by your imagination. There is no one standard for what constitutes a "good" sentence.
Just for fun, let me see if I can illustrate the point by giving you hypothetical examples of how various versions of your sentence might have been written by different authors:
James Joyce: Call it that lying passage laid west east never making marked time but vehicular. Lands lined with sons of sons of apes and Eve never knowing.
Charles Dickens: It was a plain roadway, though one well known to, and loved by, even those whose carriages now clogged it to the point of complete obstruction.
William Shakespeare: Dare not gainsay that which any fool of ten teeth can tell, how these carts and creatures bipedal crowd the path before thee.
Raymond Chandler: Cars and gawkers filled the street at both ends, all of them behind the police barricades, none of them near what was left of the dead drifter whose name I still didn't know.
Are any of these "better" than your original? Maybe, maybe not. "The street is filled with cars and people" is a perfectly good sentence, and might be exactly what you need!
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